Jon Ureña's Blog, page 10

The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 2 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

A heavy silence draped the room as if the class had witnessed an execution. Upon its weight pressing down on the motley crew of participants, ranging from college-age kids to grizzled retirees, they fidgeted awkwardly, fiddling with pens, flipping through notebooks. The clock on the wall ticked louder. Isabel twirled her chainlike necklace between her fingers as if trying to come up with diplomatic words.

“Elena, I’m… I’m glad you shared your work. Bold piece, raw and visceral. I guess we’ve grown to take water, a warm meal, or even a sneaker that’s not coated in mud for granted, haven’t we, class? That said…”

“It’s not every day that someone eats a raw salamander,” Pink Hamster Face said.

One of the retirees, his hair a mop of white curls, a scarf always wrapped around his throat, folded his arms over his belly. As he brought up routinely, he used to be a professor, and now spent his evening years writing and traveling. I’m not shitting on the guy; I wish I could go on a retirement world tour.

“Sorry, but I have to say I didn’t like this.” His voice sounded as if his throat were lined with sandpaper. “What was the point? It’s just senseless. She gets lost in a swamp and eats a salamander and then disappears? That’s awful! I don’t want to hear about that. People suffer and die every day. I don’t need a story to remind me of the awful stuff in life.”

Elena lowered her face and shot him a stony glare through a blonde lock that fell across her forehead. Isabel rose slowly from her chair as she smoothed down her off-the-shoulder black top. Her smile had the stiffness of a rusted coat rack.

“Elena, I love that you’ve taken the time to present us with a well-crafted experience. Above and beyond, as usual. I can’t deny you have talent, I’m just not sure where you’re channeling it. As your instructor, I feel obligated to remind you that not every story needs to be so bleak. Aren’t you focused on piling on the misery? That’s not to say that dark themes or dire circumstances are out of bounds. The beauty of writing is that it allows us to examine darkness while also finding paths toward light. But, as we’ve discussed in class, a narrative devoid of hope can leave the reader feeling unmoored, adrift without a life vest.”

In the fluorescent light, Elena’s pale oval showed a hint of a smirk.

“I just felt like making a horrible place.”

“Well, in that case, mission accomplished.”

“I named this piece ‘Isabel Zubiri time-travels to the primeval epoch and accidentally prevents the evolution of mammals.'”

Isabel pushed up her off-white cat-eye glasses. The forced cheeriness in her voice had worn thin.

“Seriously though. You’ve subjected our poor protagonist to one of the most unpleasant scenarios we’ve ever come across in my classes. Thrown her into the wilderness and left her to rot. I have to ask: why? What inspired this particular… direction?”

Elena shrugged as if she couldn’t justify spending the energy to explain herself. She slid her gaze onto the white table, her almond-blonde hair falling on her brow. Isabel had started checking her notes when Elena lifted her gaze defiantly and took a deep breath like a beleaguered queen about to address her subjects.

“You asked the class what conflicts they recognized in my piece, but no one answered. So I will. The only conflict that truly matters is that of the protagonist against her own mind. She clings to her optimism even as reality contradicts her at every turn. So, what inspired this direction? The truth did. You wanted us to write a little time-travel adventure, Isabel, so I showed you what would happen if someone actually traveled through time. No meetings with Leonardo da Vinci, no fairy tale endings where you get to take selfies with the Medicis. Just the raw reality of finding yourself alone in an ugly, unforgiving world. There is no epiphany. No divine revelation. The protagonist must struggle to the end although not even words can save her. The fight is its own justification. I’ll leave up to you if that’s meaningful or not. A story needs to be honest or it will fail at being anything. And that ending? I got the feeling you’d still try to maintain your carefully curated social media presence even after you tore apart a living creature with your teeth to survive.”

Isabel’s face froze in a tight-lipped grimace. When she spoke, she adopted the tone one would use with a tantruming child.

“Elena, your stories have been the equivalent of smearing mud on the audience’s faces. When you start writing solely as a means to shock or unsettle for its own sake, that’s the sign of a writer who’s lost their way. You need to dig deeper and confront the underlying issues that drive you to these dark corners. And you spoke about writing the truth. It seems you’ve been perusing my Twitter feed, so how come there’s no mention of my daughter in your story? The moment I found myself stranded in such a hellish place, my main concern would be about figuring out how to return to my Natalia.”

Elena’s blues darted around as she shifted in the chair, her reddish lips parted in puzzlement.

“Your daughter? She didn’t cross my mind. I guess you’d worry about her.”

Isabel squared her shoulders. Her gaze lingered as if she suspected Elena’s pupils would narrow into slits.

“You guess…? You don’t have much empathy, do you?”

Elena winced as if a gust of ice-cold wind had hit her face. Her features hardened, her pale fingers curled tightly around her notebook. Those tired blues met Isabel’s eyes with an intensity that made a couple of students shift in their seats.

“Maybe I don’t.”

After a heavy silence, the instructor cleared her throat and tried to dig up her usual cheerfulness, but her voice faltered.

“Well, Elena, thanks again for taking the time to present. The world is a darker, damper, and more miserable place thanks to your protagonist’s journey, I think we can all agree on that.”

Three students were texting under the table, too cowardly to endure the carnage.

“You think that having a daughter somehow makes you more human?” Elena blurted out. “More understanding? If being a parent granted people some magical wisdom, we’d have lots of enlightened souls pushing baby strollers, wouldn’t we? But that’s not the case, is it? Most parents I’ve met are as selfish and self-absorbed as anyone else, just with an extra layer of entitlement. I’d rather keep my lack of empathy than be a hypocrite.”

The taut string of tension threatened to snap and send us all flying. Pink Hamster Face’s eyes darted between the two women, her mouth hanging open. The former professor, his face set in a frown, spoke up in a raspy voice.

“Well, that was pretty cynical and, frankly, immature.” He leaned an elbow on the table, turning to our instructor. “Isabel, don’t let her disrespect you in front of your students. If she doesn’t like you or this class, she can find another place to waste her time.”

Isabel stood up slowly, her hands pressed on the table. She gave the smile one would give to a barking dog before calling the animal shelter.

“I had been feeling that your work and comments were getting more aggressive and generally destructive. You know, I’m not a self-absorbed idiot. I’m a mother and a writer and a teacher, and I’ve worked hard to get where I am. Elena, I’ve given you plenty of chances to integrate yourself into the class. I’ve encouraged you to participate and share your work. I’ve provided constructive criticism. I’ve reached out to you on a personal level, trying to understand what’s going on inside that head of yours. But it seems you’re not interested in that. Now, your fixation on me has crossed several boundaries: not only have you monitored my social media presence, but you’ve also written an explicitly violent piece targeting me. It goes beyond creative expression into concerning behavior that needs to be addressed through proper channels.”

A tic flickered beneath Elena’s left eye: the monster rattling its cage. Our instructor honed in her focus on me.

“Jon, would you mind staying as a witness after class? I’m going to have a serious talk with Elena, and I’d appreciate your support.”

She had startled me while I chewed on a fingernail. As the biggest guy in a class full of college-age girls, housewives, and retirees, I was expected to work security detail. Shouldn’t I be compensated for that unpaid labor? Could I get someone to advocate for me? Anyway, bold of Isabel to address the narrator, but at least she offered me a chance to defend the pale queen.

I leaned back on my chair and held Isabel’s gaze calmly.

“You did tell us to write a story about you. Your Twitter profile is public. Elena doesn’t know much about you, so naturally she would look into it. You’re taking this out of proportion.”

Elena stared at Isabel as if our instructor’s skull were transparent, revealing a writhing mass of worms and maggots.

“Proper channels? Are you seriously threatening me with administrative action because I wrote a story that made you uncomfortable? You asked us to write about you traveling through time, and I delivered exactly what you asked for, just not wrapped in the sugary bullshit you prefer. And now you’re trying to paint me as a stalker because I looked at your public Twitter feed? The same feed you constantly reference in class when you’re busy preaching about ‘building your author platform’? You want to talk about crossing boundaries? How about making your students write fanfiction about you in the first place? But sure, go ahead, take it to the library director. Tell them that the scary girl wrote a mean story about her instructor. I’m sure they’ll be fascinated to hear how you’re using your position to feed your ego trip while punishing students who don’t play along with your fantasy.”

A tremble of rage twitched through Isabel’s lips, but she maintained a controlled posture, her hands gripping the edge of the table.

“I see how it is. You know what, Elena? I did ask for a story about time travel with me as the protagonist. That was my mistake, and I’ll own it. But let’s be crystal clear about something: this isn’t about your creative choices or your right to explore dark themes. This is about you deliberately crafting a violent fantasy targeting me. As for my Twitter feed… yes, it’s public. Yes, I encourage building an author platform. But there’s a world of difference between professional networking and using someone’s social media presence to fuel hostile fiction. Jon, I appreciate your perspective, but Elena has demonstrated a pattern of fixation that, combined with today’s violent imagery and aggressive behavior, creates a hostile learning environment for everyone.” She leaned forward, her glare fixed on Elena. “You don’t care about the world, just what you think of it. All your stories are you. They’re not written to connect, but to push people away.” Isabel straightened back. “I’ve been running this class for a few years, and you’re the only person who refuses to take my feedback in the spirit of helping you grow. If you want to continue writing, that’s up to you, but I can’t have you poisoning my classes with your bitterness and cruelty anymore.”

Pink Hamster Face sniffled and dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve. The cold fire that had smoldered behind Elena’s blue irises snuffed itself out, leaving her stare lifeless. She tipped her face upward, her eyeballs reflecting the fluorescents. She rose from the chair mechanically, then gathered her papers, notebook, pen, half-empty water bottle, and shoved them into her bag. After pushing the chair toward the table, she addressed the whole class in a flat tone.

“Don’t worry, I’ll spare you the discomfort of my presence. Have fun learning how to write meaningless fluff that’ll never matter to anyone.”

-----

Author’s note: today’s song is “Inflammatory Writ” by Joanna Newsom. Also this live version. Also this other live version.

On Writing: Plot point generation #3

[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

A story is made out of meaningful stuff that happens. Each unit of meaningful stuff that happens is often referred to as a plot point. Here’s how to come up with them, before you consider fitting them into a structure.

-Is there a test that the protagonist could go through and that he doesn’t believe he can pass? What events would it suggest?
-What does the protagonist have to confront to solve the problem set up for him?
-What events could come up from bringing unresolved issues to the surface?
-How could you push your characters to the limit?
-Find that thing that your character would rather die than do, and make them do it.
-Characters must confront the very thing they would least like to, and confronting this thing is a kind of hell. More precisely, it is their own personal hell. But through this confrontation, they are transformed.
-How can you make the conflicts varied and surprising?
-Imagine situations in which internal conflict will attack severely a character.
-Disturbances don’t have to happen just at the beginning. You can sprinkle them throughout. When in doubt about what to write next, make more trouble.
-Come up with a long list of obstacles and opposition characters that can be thrown in the lead’s way. Go crazy. When you’ve got fifteen or twenty of these, choose the best ones and list them in order from bad to worse to worst.
-Does the conflict force the protagonist to take action, whether it’s to rationalize it away or actually change? Imagine what would you want to avoid if you were your protagonist, and then make her face it.
-A story’s job is to put the protagonist through tests that, even in her wildest dreams, she doesn’t think she can pass.
-Do expose your character’s flaws, demons, and insecurities. Stories are about people who are uncomfortable, and as we know, nothing makes us more uncomfortable than change. A story is often about watching someone’s house fall around their ears, beam by beam. Besides the fact that perfection is not actually possible, things that are not falling apart are dull. It’s your job to dismantle all the places where your protagonist seeks sanctuary and to actively force him out into the cold. But a hero only becomes a hero by doing something heroic, rising to the occasion, against all odds, and confronting one’s own inner demons in the process. It’s up to you to keep your protagonist on track by making sure each external twist brings him face to face with something about himself that he’d probably rather not see.
-Don’t forget there’s no such thing as a free lunch. This is another way of saying everything must be earned, which means that nothing can come to your protagonist easily, after all, the reader’s goal is to experience how he reacts when things go wrong. Stories can help us expand the range of options in life by testing, in small increments, how closely one can approach the brink of disaster without falling over it. This means the protagonist has to work for everything he gets, often in ways he didn’t anticipate, much harder than anything he would have signed on for. The only time things come easily is when they are the opposite of what is actually best for him.
-For maximum conflict, always put your hero in the last place he wants to be.
-For some great conflict, place your characters in an environment that is their opposite.
-The scene where a character must ask for help from someone he screwed over earlier always works.
-You gotta throw your characters in the shit. You gotta kick them. You gotta demoralize them.
-Take a character who hates something more than anything, then put him in a situation where he must pretend to love it.
-Take a character who desperately wants to get somewhere, then have him held up by someone who wants to talk.
-Deliberately write your characters into situations that are impossible to get out of, then figure a way to get them out of them.
-Place your hero in plenty of “character emergencies.” A “character emergency” is when your character is placed in a situation where he has no choice but to act.
-What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
-Think of ways to create lots of internal conflict (hard choices).
-Who can betray the protagonist?
-Make your characters clash. Think of ways of doing so.
-How would the other character(s) and the world react to what the protagonist (or other characters) are doing?
-How could you pull the rug out from under your protagonist when he’s at his most vulnerable?
-How do you make it harder for your protagonist? See what bad thing could happen, and let it happen. Try to make it worse than he imagined it could possibly be, worse than you imagined it could be at first blush.
-Look for conflict that flows from the plot, and that comes down to character, to character motivations, goals and reactions.

Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 5 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

The horn signaling the hour-and-a-half lunch break blared, and I jolted awake to the sound of my Chevrolet Lumina’s door slamming shut. I’d climbed into an oven that reeked of scorched plastic and molten metal, so I rolled down the window, stuck my head out, and waited until I felt steady enough to drive without passing out.

The morning shift had stripped my nerves raw, compressing a week’s worth of strain into hours. Dazed, I started the engine and put distance between myself and the faces that recognized me—faces that might demand answers.

Through the window, workers from other workshops in red and green smocks slid out of view, alongside highway crews in reflective vests. Broken people stranded in this town, far from home and any semblance of destiny. Jobs that barely paid enough to keep a roof overhead. They endured it all, along with the desert and brain-melting heat, because they had no future, because what mattered in these people had died years ago. Their options narrowed to one or two cliff-edge jobs to cling to, while the world kept spinning.

A sidewalk newspaper rack made me slow, though I drove past. I needed to buy a paper to see if any article mentioned a missing child. Had police visited that dirt road near the oil field? Maybe an alert would announce they were hunting the killer. I’d scrubbed the blood I’d spotted in the dark, adrenaline sharpening my eyes, but must’ve missed stains blended into the dirt—blood the child’s wounds had spat when a tire burst his torso. An ultraviolet flashlight would expose cornflower-blue spills. Cops would collect samples, send them for analysis. Or would they assume someone hit a coyote? Would a cornered note in the paper beg the driver who struck an animal to notify animal control? A coyote dragging a mangled leg, bleeding out as it wandered the desert in a nightmare of pain, though a bullet to the skull would’ve sufficed.

As I drove, I startled awake again, catching myself sliding my left fingers under my sunglasses to rub my eyelid. Sweat pooled, teeth clenched. How had I avoided crashing? And now I worried in advance: when I’d hit the child last night, the day’s papers had already gone to print. Any news would break tomorrow. Maybe right now, at that dirt road cutting through the oil field, four or five patrol cars encircled the spot, forensic cops crouching over clues.

On the way to Wendy’s, I spotted two police cruisers prowling the streets. For minutes one idled ahead of me, garish as a parrot among pigeons. They didn’t know who watched them. If they did, they’d rip me from these people grinding through routines, loving others, enjoying life, pairing off, reproducing. The penal system would digest me, and I’d become a nuisance to dozens of eyes that’d rather drag me to a backlot and shoot me.

In the Wendy’s parking lot, trailer trucks walled off the view. A trucker leaned against his cab while chatting with an old man in a vest studded with flag pins and NRA badges.

After parking, I climbed out and arched my back until it cracked. Against the blue sky, bird silhouettes with splayed wings fluttered like kites caught in a draft. I weaved through dozens of parking spots, dodging cars reversing or hunting spaces. In the single-story building’s windows, jutting above the sea of heads, busts of people carried trays heaped with food. From a candy-red pole, the logo’s pigtailed girl smiled, her red braids perked upright.

Inside, I claimed a table near the back but facing the entrance, close to where the woman usually sat. Waiting in line, I stood behind a group of workers in paint-speckled coveralls. Their chatter made me wish for a mute button to block even the reverberations rattling my skull. They spoke to fill silence, parroting phrases others had recycled, mimicking cadences and accents. Truth and worth depended on majority approval.

At my table, the first bite of burger coated my tongue with ketchup and meat juice as if I’d spent the morning gargling sand. By the third bite, she walked in. I clamped the burger between my chin and tray while tilting my head to fix her in my monocular vision. With each step, her blonde hair floated like a feather. Gold hoops swayed from her earlobes. A gym bag hung from the shoulder opposite me, and she wore a sleeveless Lycra shirt with gray yoga pants. Her tanned skin glowed, freshly showered. In profile, her ass curved like a half-globe, the pants clinging to solid thighs, tracing every contour as if she’d walked in naked.

She veered toward a table at my nine o’clock, trailed by her boyfriend, a man around thirty-five. Most of his ash-blond hair hid under a beige hat. His thick belt buckle glinted under fluorescent lights.

At the table, she set down her bag and exchanged words with him before he joined the line. She shifted her hip, distracted by her phone. When she switched her weight, the pants’ fabric outlined the inverted, rounded M of her vulva.

I swallowed a bite to douse the heat flash surging through me, my heart pounding like a skydiver’s. I wanted to grip her nape and devour her mouth, those flamingo-pink lips. Slide my hands under the Lycra hugging her back, hike it up to knead the taut skin along her spine. Squeeze her ass. We’d stagger like drunk dancers, knocking trays from customers’ hands, until a table jarred us still. I’d rip her clothes off, lay her across the table, and mount her like a baboon.

She settled into her chair, thumb gliding over her phone. Features Photoshopped at birth, that hair, that body—crafted by generations of good genes mating with good genes. Her lips curled into an unconscious smile untouched by grief, untainted by intrusive thoughts.

I nibbled fries, head tilted, hidden behind tinted lenses, stealing these minutes while she shared her break with her boyfriend.

He returned with a tray of soda cups, fries, a burger, and a salad bowl. I glanced down to avoid detection. Couldn’t let him wonder why I always sat this distance, facing her. I timed my glances—deniable if questioned. Sometimes I turned toward windows or the clamoring crowd. If caught staring, I’d claim I was zoning out. But when my gaze trapped her, I savored her image like caviar.

Over lunch, their lips shaped silent syllables. Smiles, coded gestures. She laced fingers with his, plucked invisible hairs from his shirt. At some joke, her laugh pierced the din. Drunk on mirth, she doubled over to rest her chin on his arm before straightening with catlike eyes. Her lower face split into a grin as if handing out thousand-dollar bills.

Why did the boyfriend keep stabbing lettuce leaves between comments, ignoring her? He should’ve hugged her, smothered her with kisses. Maybe he’d grown used to his luck, or only those who lacked it noticed, those who’d burned through relationships expecting doom, unable to forget the darkness festering in human minds. Like a centenarian, I envied teenagers’ ignorance, decades still ahead before they’d learn their consciousnesses would settle among body parts screaming in pain.

When his phone rang and his face turned professional, she fiddled with her own device while chewing. He nodded at the void, stood, and crossed the room. His tucked-shirt belly bulged like a half-inflated balloon. Two diners sidestepped him as he strode like he owned the place.

The guard was gone. I relaxed, spacing burger bites and Nestea sips, fixating on her as she tilted her face to check her skin in a compact’s mirror for barely-there creases. Her hair cascaded over one shoulder, baring the opposite side of her neck, where the sternocleidomastoid muscle strained under the weight.

I ached to caress that tan skin, scratch an itch mid-spine. Her hair would drape my arm. In my mind, she cupped my cheek, slid her palm to my ear. How would foreign skin feel—skin that wanted my touch? The memory of such sensations had eroded, unrecreatable by hours of thought or fantasy.

I snapped from hypnosis to my trash-strewn tray, forty minutes left before returning to the soul-crushing job that bought my hours cheap. I’d hit and killed a child, then hidden him in my trunk. The spark I’d briefly contained faded, replaced by swampy cold, that of a reanimated corpse shuffling through a mausoleum.

What did this woman feel, loved and loving, with her aristocratic grasp of pain? What was it like to wake up wanting to live? Did I crave her to replace her boyfriend, or did I mourn being born unlovable, this lump of broken and disfigured flesh? Beyond fantasy, would I even want a partner? My presence would poison her like radiation, warp her into a light-sucking tumor. People didn’t matter enough to me; any woman would realize it in weeks.

Besides, I knew the drill: inane chats about office drama, her friend squabbles that’d feel apocalyptic to her. Filling silences lest she think us doomed. Remembering compliments to keep her valued. Endless shopping hours, holding bags, bored enough to stab my corneas. Abandoning movies and books I liked for hers. Curbing opinions to TV-sanctioned takes, lest she deem me negative. The marathon of impressing her and her circle, competing daily with lurking men. Sacrificing solitude, craving it while she recharged socially. Allowing a job to devour my waking hours so I could one day offer her a two-story suburban home. Reproducing, duty-bound to drag innocents into this dying world.

She’d push me to change, then grow bored once I mimicked her desires. Stranded in the desert, oceans and miles apart, I’d endure calls where she’d repeat some new man’s name—how funny he was, how intriguing his opinions. How I shouldn’t mind, because she thought of him as a brother. They’d evict me from the house I’d helped pay for. If I’d stupidly bred, child support would crush me, funding a kid taught to call another man “Dad.”

Better to admire beauties like this Wendy’s goddess from afar. I’d cherish her like a fresco on a crumbling wall of this rotting universe, while others lashed themselves together with barbed wire to avoid being pulled into the dark.

When the boyfriend returned, he planted his phone-hand on the table, speared salad leaves with the other, then jerked his head toward the lot. She smiled, nodded, tucked her compact away. They left shoulder-to-shoulder.

I slumped. I’d see her the following day, until she stopped coming.

Workers shot glances at me, the weirdo with sunglasses and scars under one eye. One muttered to his tablemate. I’d hogged this table too long. Behind the counter, minimum-wage teens wondered how to eject me without triggering an explosion.

I shoveled the remaining fries, then dumped wrappers on the tray and trashed it, freeing the table for those who deserved it.

-----

Author’s note: I wrote this novella about ten years ago. It’s contained in my collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Trailer Trash” by Modest Mouse.

Life update (01/23/2025)

[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]

Now that my basement girl has decided to embark us two on a new creative journey (the novel The Scrap Colossus, whose first part I posted), I exist in that antsy state of bliss in which I can’t wait to return to my writing desk and commune with my girl in the most incestuous manner imaginable. While the novel isn’t entirely new, as it’s based on a failed story I discarded ten years ago, I’ve salvaged the workable parts as notes for what feels like a wholly new experience. One of the best things is that I know it’s going to be real fun. With Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, my basement girl wanted to process her strange grief, and during those months, I worked at it like a man possessed. It was a very emotionally taxing experience. But with The Scrap Colossus, basement girl is trying to come to terms with a period of our lives in which I had become a reclusive wreck, hopelessly obsessed slash in love with a certain songwriter, and now I can look back upon those years with humor and shame.

Speaking of a certain motocross legend, this morning I woke up spontaneously near the witching hour, from an intense dream. This happens quite often, although it hadn’t recently. For whatever reason, I revisited the aforementioned novella titled Motocross Legend, Love of My Life , some chapters of it. If you enjoy my stuff and you haven’t read it, you probably should. Of course, soon enough I was crying, because that’s what you do when you read that story. Or at least what I do, every single time. When I mentioned before that while writing that novella I felt like a man possessed, I wasn’t being metaphorical. Something came over me. The story sparked autonomously while I listened for the first time Spiritualized’s song "Hey Jane." Right then, my basement girl unraveled with all sorts of images, dialogue bits and such. For the next few days, she sent bubbling up scene after scene, which I dutifully arranged, and ultimately coordinated myself to let her speak through me.

I’ve yet to understand fully, and probably never will, why this story needed to be told. I’ve never loved anyone like the narrator loved Izar Lizarraga. Perhaps it was an echo of something that happened before I was even born. But tonight, as I read through the latter parts of the story, it occurred to me that part of that grief may be related to my childhood. Although I retain very, very few images of my early life, I know that my first seven or so years were spent in communion with my basement girl. I was an autistic kid who never interacted with others spontaneously, a fact that bothered my teachers so much that they pushed others to “bring me out of my shell,” which led me to meet sociopaths, coke addicts, casual bullies, and other colorful people; most teachers around here seem to subscribe to the secular religion of Equality, and all people who stood in the fringes were equivalent. Anyway, my early childhood was spent writing and drawing feverishly. I was always hunched over a notebook or wandering around while daydreaming. It was blissful. In fact, the sole issues I had with that period of my childhood were related to my family and other people; I felt fine alone.

But then, when I was seven, my mother wanted to free up my room to have a third child. She had always wanted three regardless of space, but in retrospect she probably also considered me a failed child. She put me as an unwanted guest in my older brother’s room, and from then on until I was eighteen and ended up with a room of my own again, my mental health declined steadily, and my connection with my basement girl suffered to the extent that at times it felt completely severed. At some point I should probably go in length about how depersonalized I became.

I really don’t want to speak much about my experience of sharing a room with my older brother, but let me paint you a small picture: he always had to sleep with the TV and the radio on, because he couldn’t stand silence. I always had to watch or listen whatever he wanted to listen or watch, which were often the most popular idiotic shows, or else sports. I couldn’t read nor study in what was supposed to be my room; to be able to read anything, I had to wander in the streets. I was likely the sole child that could be seen walking around in public while reading a book or manga. There were numerous other noises coming from his person that triggered my sensory issues on a constant basis. By the time I became a teenager, my mental health was so terrible that I slipped in and out of psychosis, although I was mostly psychotic. The complex novel I tried to write at the time was so terrifyingly incoherent and lacking in any sense of reality that at some point I threw away all my copies of it. It’s due to pure cowardice that I’m still alive, as I wanted to be dead most of the time. I think that the story of mine that goes most in depth about my experiences as a teenager is the harrowing tale A Millennium of Shadows . You need a strong stomach for that one.

I’m fairly certain that I have PTSD from my years 7 to 18, from the utter lack of being respected as a human being. I complained to my mother numerous times about many things regarding my living situation, only to always be replied with a variation of, “You gotta understand, he has problems.” My own needs never mattered. I could barely stand to be in the presence of my older brother since, but because my life is a fucking joke, I have ended up working at the same office. The damage that was done to my psyche during those formative years will never be mended; I’m just doing my best with the wreckage.

That relates to my tale about a motocross legend because my innermost self, probably my basement girl herself, mourns that severance: the lost years, all the great things we could have done if she hadn’t been driven away. So we gotta make up for lost time.

Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 4 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

When I approached the workshop on my Chevrolet Lumina, I pulled over into a gap among the workers’ parked vehicles, but during lunch break and at the end of the workday, dozens of people with limited reasoning would be swarming near my car. What if some shift in their thinking made them curious enough to pry open the trunk? People who died in their own homes ended up discovered after someone forced the door.

Instead, I parked outside the adjacent lot, an abandoned tire store. Far from the other cars but near enough to the shop to discourage any vagrant from stealing it. With my luck, I had to consider those possibilities. I belonged to the same breed as that ranger who got struck by lightning so many times he ended up in a wheelchair, then shot himself, and whose tombstone was split by another lightning bolt.

I closed the car door and walked a few steps ahead. No one was roaming the workshop’s yard. The clamor of machinery streamed out of the two-story building with its corrugated metal walls as though it were suffering indigestion.

A quick glance at my Chevrolet Lumina revealed a dent in the bumper. I wanted to ditch the vehicle or cover it with a tarp. What would anyone who saw it think? They’d know I’d hit something, and by the shape and size of the dent, probably a rock or an animal. Maybe no one would ask, but between machine components on the assembly line, I’d have to invent some story.

I opened the side door to the locker room, put on my smock and gloves, and stepped into the workshop. I was engulfed by an industrial music concert—the pounding and buzzing of assembly machines, the whir of conveyor belts and the cylinders that drove them. The fans, as big as a fifties TV set, spun their blades to a blur so we wouldn’t bake. I wove between groups of operators seated at their lines, heads tucked between their shoulders, backs hunched in purple smocks. Intent as watchmakers.

At the far end of the floor, I spotted my station and my empty stool. As if radar had warned him I’d arrived, Héctor glanced up from the piece he was handling and shot me one of his disdainful looks. I dropped onto the stool with a huff. My fingers took up the part that was coming down the line. The routine shackling me to this job would cancel out all thought, reducing me to a programmed robot.

“Thanks for dumping your parts on us for a while,” Héctor said.

“Any stabbing pains?” asked Christopher, smiling to my right.

“Vomiting,” I said.

“Feeling better?”

“If it happens again, I’ll run for the bathroom.”

“Thanks for the cake yesterday, by the way—because the supervisor threw you a surprise party.”

“I know,” I replied in a curt tone that said I was done talking about my birthday.

The parts rolled along the belt like bar patrons arriving by name. I knew which loose plastic bits fit together and how to connect each cable. This monotony stung like a rash. It didn’t matter who we were nor what we thought.

Opposite me, Héctor had lowered his olive-toned face, glossy black hair dangling in strands as his fingers worked a part. To my right, Christopher stood slack-jawed, arching his back into an inverted C. Did they feel this job demeaned them? Did they even have any dignity left to lose, or were they glad the steady flow of parts kept them occupied?

To fill the orders, we had to switch off our inner worlds, while our humanity peeled away like sand off skin after a day at the beach. We maintained a conspiracy of silence. We pretended this life was worth bearing, and we dreaded anyone’s saying otherwise out loud lest we dropped dead, the way a machine goes dark the moment you yank its power cord.

Over the next two hours, I stacked tension in my shoulders, arms, and hands. Sooner or later some muscle would lock up, rendering me unable to attach the pieces and cables.

When the break came, I shot up and crossed the workshop to the yard. I stepped out into the heat. As I turned toward the fence that separated us from the adjacent lot, a mosquito buzzed my ear, and I swatted at it.

I expected to find my trunk forced open, signs someone had wedged in a crowbar. Behind me, the workers were spilling out into the yard talking and laughing, so I avoided looking like I was policing my car—or hiding something. A mass of purple smocks crammed into the limited shady spots under the building’s eaves. The sunlight bathed the world in a piss-yellow glow, while the silhouettes of those sheltering workers looked like charcoal sketches.

Even though my hair was heating up, I needed to recharge. Being around so many people would drain me. I planted myself by the fence marking the yard’s boundary, among dry blades of grass shooting from the cracked earth. I took out my cigarette pack. Across the road, the desert spread flat for miles, but my dead eye made judging distance a struggle. A few roads slashed through that orange-cream land. The sun glittered on truck trailers and car bodies like Morse code. The earth, dust clouds, and tiny vehicles shimmered in the distance. Dozens of oil pumps dotted the dead expanse, getting sparser the farther they were, with no pattern I could decipher—like someone had just chosen random spots to drop those machines, convinced they’d suck out buried treasure. The gunk they drew up had financed half the local industry, and that struck me as a miracle.

The sun was roasting my face, and sweat seeped out as if I were being squeezed dry. Christopher, all lankiness and dragging heels, crossed the yard toward me. I blinked against the sun even through tinted lenses, and a wave of discomfort washed over me. He smiled like a puppy, stopped next to me, fanned himself, and tugged at the collar of his polo—buttoned all the way up—peeking out of his smock.

“It’s really hot out here, right?”

I wanted to say yeah, and if he didn’t like it he should join the workers whose silhouettes blurred in the shade, but I didn’t want to waste the energy. I shrugged and took a drag.

Héctor and John—or Joseph—appeared, heading our way. Their footsteps kicked up dust. Héctor’s gut jiggled with each step, and his thick mane glistened in the sun like a gasoline puddle. Next to him, John—or Joseph—walked with a springy gait, like he was on his way to a party. His torso curved along a crooked spine. The smock covered part of a white shirt that must have cost three times what mine did, and he’d popped its collar frat-boy style. His clothes hid the growths on his left shoulder. Past the rolled-up right sleeve, the arm looked like a botched experiment, covered in clusters and folds of rhinoceros-gray skin.

Up close, Héctor’s smock shoulders were sprinkled with dandruff, as if he’d darted outside in a brief snowstorm and hurried back in. He shot me the second type of look he always reserved for me, as if I were a pitbull whose mood concerned him; he hoped that if I decided to attack, I’d choose someone else’s throat.

Four evolutionary dead ends gathered in a miasma of sweat. Magnets glomming together, little circles of humanity where everyone had to save everyone else from boredom.

I avoided their eyes and focused on inhaling smoke to soothe my aggravation. If only I could flip a switch and go invisible. On breaks, I’d escape to some corner of the yard so no one could pin me down with their gaze, and I’d recharge the energy that these pauses allowed. My assigned coworkers would wonder where that one-eyed bastard had gone off to. Camouflaged like a predator in the jungle, I’d hear every nasty remark about me, each personal reason they found me disagreeable.

Héctor was rolling strands of tobacco in paper. He slid the paper between the stubs of his index and middle fingers, which looked like they’d emerged from the womb minus the first joint.

“Did you see last night’s Mavericks game?” John—or Joseph—said. “That alley-oop from Curry to Nowitzki?”

He looked at the three of us. Christopher, maybe embarrassed, shook his head.

“Seriously?” John—or Joseph—said. “None of you? Bunch of ignoramuses.”

He grinned at us as though he’d had his teeth bleached, but in reality they’d worn down in concave and diagonal shapes, enamel grayed or eroded to transparency. Too often the condition of a person’s teeth reflected the state of their mind.

As if John—or Joseph—had just insulted his entire family, Christopher rattled off teams and scores, plus names, presumably players. John—or Joseph—chimed in with stats and point totals while fidgeting with his right sleeve, that snagged on the lumps and folds of gray skin. Up close, his white shirt had clearly needed ironing for weeks.

The sun had me drenched, and my brain felt as though it were melting. My thoughts, swimming in a grimy fishbowl, barely let me lift the cigarette to my mouth. If something about that car gave me away, would I even notice? Next to that vacant lot, the trunk shone, and a few inches of shade fell across it in a rhomboid pattern. How hot must it be inside?

I wiped my forehead, the sweat sliding down my wrist, and patted my cheeks. I had to stay alert—a slip of a few seconds could haunt me the rest of my life.

Héctor nudged Christopher in the ribs as he watched a group of workers crossing the yard.

“Check it out. I ran into him on my way to the bathroom today, and for the third time he flat-out ignored me. Acted like I was invisible. Must think that used Camry he bought makes him better than us.” He craned his neck as if to shout at the group rounding the workshop corner, but kept the same volume. “Conceited bastard.”

Christopher was writing in the palm of his hand with a pen. Héctor frowned and leaned sideways to see.

“Does it matter that much?”

“I’ll forget if I don’t.”

“Do you remember to look at your hand for what you’re supposed to remember?”

“Sometimes.”

Héctor laughed out of one side of his mouth while the other corner gripped the cigarette.

“How’re you ever going to meet a woman? If you land a date, you’ll forget her name or where you’re meeting. Will you even remember you met her?”

Christopher swallowed, his thick Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. He straightened, slipped the pen into a pocket of his smock, and managed a smile.

“She’ll have to be patient.”

Héctor shook his head while smiling like a boy who pelts rats with rocks and awards himself points for each kill. Christopher, instead of ignoring him or firing back, wiped away his dismay and hung on every word the man uttered, dancing to his tune in a tutu. Then again, that’s what other people were for: to vouch for your existence, even if only by making fun of you.

“By the way,” Héctor said, “I saw the supervisor carrying a bunch of résumés on her clipboard. She’s looking to fill the coordinator job.”

“The last coordinator started as an operator, didn’t he?” said John—or Joseph.

“That’s what I thought. So get used to the idea you’re talking to the next coordinator.”

“You want to be coordinator?” Christopher asked.

Héctor squinted at him and blew a smoke ring.

“If I said you’re talking to the next coordinator, and you’re talking to me, what do you think that means? Do I want the job or not?”

“You want it?”

“The pay’s better, and I’d get to improve the workshop’s routines. I don’t think anyone else has volunteered. I’ll seduce the supervisor—flatter her for a few days, pick up Starbucks on the way. A Caramel Frappuccino. I’ll tell her what I want, and she’ll take it into account.” He shook his head while surveying the oil-pump-strewn plain like a general sizing up his next conquest. “I’ll clean this place up, break people of their idiotic habits. Sleep like a baby.”

As I clamped the cigarette filter between my lips, I turned my sunglasses on Héctor before I could even think to hide my grimace. That man needed to sit on top even of a heap of shit. I wanted a shower—a cold jet of water to rinse away the sweat sliding down my back, chest, and legs, making my underwear stick.

“You don’t find it funny,” Héctor said.

In the distance, my car called me, demanding attention like a child wandering too close to the road.

“I asked you, Cyclops,” Héctor added.

He furrowed his brow, studying my face as if counting each pimple. What was I supposed to answer? Before I could muster the energy to part my chapped lips, Héctor went on.

“Oh, I forgot—no point talking to us.”

I held his stare drilling into my sunglasses. I took a drag to steady my pulse, to dissolve the image of pressing out my cigarette on his forehead. When I spoke, it was like scraping rust off a pipe.

“Half-truth.”

-----

Author’s note: I wrote this novella about ten years ago. It’s contained in my collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

This part reminded me of dealing with the other disabled folks I met while attending that stupid course and being shown the workshops. Check the first entry of this tale for more details. I don’t miss it one bit. Although I’ve forgotten most of that experience (my neurological configuration is terrible at retaining memories), I’m fairly certain that all the workshop-related people in this story are made out of pieces of those I got to know, either there or at the center for autism. Héctor himself was based on a fella diagnosed with paranoid personality disorder, who kept railing on about autists among many others.

On Writing: Plot point generation #2

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

A story is made out of meaningful stuff that happens. Each unit of meaningful stuff that happens is often referred to as a plot point. Here’s how to come up with them, before you consider fitting them into a structure.

-Could weather create delays and accidents? Could it obscure vision, or make someone weak or faint?
-What setting in your story could make some character to feel sad, fearful, nostalgic, angry, guilty, etc.? Think about the plot points that could be derived from that.
-Find in your setting specific places that have extra significance, or places where events recur. To make a place iconic, make something big happen there.
-Prior to the climax of the novel, find, brainstorm, try to apply six points at which your protagonist can demonstrate some heroic quality.
-How will you show what your characters feel? What will express their thoughts? What will reveal their inner struggles?
-Have your characters do things only they would do. Every character action represents that character. So when they act, have them act in a manner unique to them. Use every character action in your story to sell us on the unique nature of that character.
-What events would reveal character?
-Create stakes-raising dilemmas that give your protagonists opportunities to use their unique abilities. Let that explain why this character succeeded where others failed.
-Can you allow characters to do the things that characters with different labels (protagonist, villain, etc.) would do?
-How would a reflection character show the protagonist why and maybe how he can make it through the door, when he might slip back, have fear and doubt, second-guess himself?
-Figure out plot points in which the allies are there for your hero, stick by him, speak truth in love, reflect back what the hero needs to see in order to understand and move one step closer to his goal?
-In what plot point could the most “ally” character oppose your character regarding her goal?
-Can you find a moment for each of your main characters to want the opposite of their hearts’ desire? Can you make it bigger, more emotional?
-Where can you have characters say something other than what they mean (subtext)? Hint at something secret?
-Can you find/add five places in your novel where a character acts rashly, inconsistently, contrary?
-Imagine a moment when your protagonist is moved, unsettled or disturbed. This might occur when he’s facing a difficult choice, needing something badly, suffering a setback or surprise, having a self-realization, learning something shocking, or feeling in any way overwhelmed. Write down all the emotions inherent in this moment, both obvious and hidden.
-What’s the biggest way in which your protagonist can act out? What can she destroy? -Whom can she attack? What truthful thing can she say? What will shock others in the story?
-Let your characters make mistakes: protagonists, antagonists, and secondary characters.
-What events would push someone’s buttons relative to worldview and personal belief systems?
-What would a character’s belief/past experience cause him to do?
-What secrets does a character have, what lies he has told, to others and even to himself, that might cause plot point issues?
-Think of plot points that would suggest the main character will get just more entrenched in his flaw, making it impossible to change, and others which suggest the possibility of changing.
-What key moment in your novel showcases the primary reflection character/ally’s support?
-What is your protagonist good at doing? Throw them the opposite of what they’re best at and make them deal with it.
-Think up a moment in your novel in which the hero and the antagonist agree on something.
-Think of a moment in which the antagonist is actually vulnerable and / or empathetic.
-What is the primary antagonist and what key moment showcases the big conflict and issue between them?
-The impact character may or may not be actively trying to get the protagonist to see that Truth, but he’s going to be there at crucial moments in the story to help the protagonist see the error of his ways. He has the answers the protagonist is looking for (even though the protagonist won’t know that at the beginning of the story), and those answers are going to end up being pivotal to the protagonist’s ability to conquer the antagonist and the external conflict in his quest for his story goal.
-A character can’t change without something that impacts him by consistently and convincingly conflicting with his belief in the Lie.
-What events could show off or amplify the inner journey?
-Start by determining self-revelation, at the end of the story, then go back to the beginning and figure out the hero’s need and desire.
-Brainstorm actions that prove the transformation.
-Plant a redemptive action, the actions which could solve MC’s “fatal flaw”, and have the other person fail to do it.
-Think of a way of showing a character’s change by putting him in a similar situation but acting differently, even to the point of disagreeing with his previous action in similar circumstances.
-What event could bring about change for your protagonist?
-What event could bring about change for a secondary character?
-Throughout the story, the protagonist and his blind faith in his Lie are going to keep running smack into the impact character’s Truth. The protagonist may want to be left in peace with his Lie, but the impact character’s persistent presence keeps churning up the protagonist’s awareness of the Truth–and creating internal conflict.

Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 3 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

I staggered out of the bedroom while pressing my temple to contain a throbbing headache, and from the dining table I was greeted by the sight of the duffel bag open and gutted, clots of blood around the zipper. T-shirts, pants, and the undergarments of my military uniform lay spread out across the table, rolled into cylinders and secured with elastic bands. Balls of socks. Razor blades and shaving lotion tucked into a plastic ziplock bag.

To distract myself, I opened the balcony door and stepped onto the two-foot ledge that served as a terrace. I leaned against the railing. Delivery vans were stirring the stillness, and a few sleepwalkers were getting into their cars on their way to work. The sky was so clear it seemed clouds existed only in someone’s imagination, so the air would stay mild until daybreak.

I rubbed my face. Before I drove to the workshop, I’d reserve a few measured minutes to breathe in that mix of desert air and traffic fumes.

The stretch of street on my left reminded me of the landscapes the Coyote would paint on a rock wall to catch the Road Runner. Past a winding path between trimmed lawns, a parking lot surrounded a beige, boxlike building housing a Mexican restaurant, and right next door stood a single-story Jack in the Box. Above their roofs rose a tall pillar, like a ruin missing the roof it once supported, showing the Chevron gas station logo. At the end of the road, the cars coming and going looked like grime on an old lens, blurring with the distant silhouettes of trees, one-story buildings, and billboards.

I had gotten to know this view the day I traveled to the city, was guaranteed a job at the workshop, and wandered around until I saw the vacancy sign in front of this apartment block. Such a backdrop convinced me that I lived in a solid world, but for all I knew, those cars and pedestrians that came and went may have vanished from existence as soon as they disappeared from sight. Sure, I’d grown familiar with the stretch leading from my apartment to the workshop, plus a few miles on the outskirts among the oil fields, but the rest of the world could have disappeared, erased into the void between planets.

I took a deep breath and returned to the living room. I dragged the duffel bag into the shower, soaked it under the spray, and scrubbed away the clotted blood. Diluted blood stained the rush of water flowing down the drain. When I was satisfied, I left the soaked bag in the sink. A trace of the stench of urine and excrement lingered in the fibers, woven into them.

I wandered around the living room. What had I left out of place yesterday for the future version of me, the one getting up in the morning, to deal with? The breakfast mug beside a spoon crusted with dried milk. The open box of cornflakes. On the other side of the counter I had stacked the three freezer drawers and the ice tray.

A chill went through my guts. I checked each drawer to see what food would go bad. A few boxes of instant noodles, steaks wrapped in plastic. Fortunately, my paycheck didn’t allow me to stock up on too many supplies. By tonight, after getting home from the workshop, I’d cook whatever my stomach could handle, and toss the rest in the garbage.

I washed the breakfast mug. I brought it along with the box of cereal to the dining table. I fetched cold milk from the fridge. As I poured cornflakes to fill the mug, the sound of that little cascade satisfied me like a dog hearing food rattle in its bowl. I splashed the milk in. Sitting there, lifting the spoon to my mouth, I lost any sense of actually having breakfast, and whenever I snapped out of it, my gaze was glued to the closed freezer door. The fridge’s hum called to me like a prayer echoing in a church. My insides rumbled, the milk tasted bitter. I left the mug by the sink.

Under a lukewarm shower, I braced my hands against the wall and blew away the water running over my mouth. I could call in and say I’d woken up sick. I could fake it. But no, I couldn’t. If any clue on that dirt road led the police to me and the very next day I, someone who never took vacation days, failed to show up at work, that would instantly label me a suspect. To survive until the boy disappeared, I had to stick to my routine. I’d endure the anxiety, the waves of chills threatening to rattle my spine, for the rest of today, Thursday, and Friday. Those forty-eight hours of the weekend were mine. I could travel without making excuses. I’d hide the body in some bushes and close this chapter as if the boy had never crossed paths with my car.

I walked around the bedroom looking for yesterday’s shirt, until I remembered I’d thrown it away. I put on a clean shirt. At the front door, before putting on my sunglasses, I fumbled with my key ring as I pictured what a cop would notice if he came in. Nothing among my small hoard of belongings hinted at a boy, and nobody would show up here for the rest of the week. I’d dodged that bullet. Until the weekend, my apartment would serve as a mausoleum. The boy would lie there, oblivious to the world of traffic and work baking in the sun.

I put on my glasses and headed downstairs. In the heat of dawn, I wanted to tug at my shirt collar to cool off. I took refuge behind the tinted lenses, which blocked other people’s stares the way a one-way mirror does in an interrogation room.

Traffic was still lined with cars and delivery vans. How would my coworkers see me over the course of the split shift? I had to act the same as always: the guy who keeps quiet, stays out on the periphery. But in my mind’s eye I saw myself sitting at my station on the line, hunched over another anonymous metal part, struggling to hide that I’d killed a child. During breaks, I’d hurry around the staircase leading to the supervisor’s office, avoiding her, and duck into the bathroom to take a deep breath. When we all went out to the yard, I’d huddle with the other workers—a colony of elephant seals—in the rectangle of shade under a small roof, to smoke while the sun roasted the tips of my sneakers, and my lungs filled with that superheated air smelling of dirt and metal. And the entire time I’d be anticipating the moment someone discovered the corpse packed away in my freezer.

For these three days, all my energy would be devoted to keeping that shield in place. The rest of the time, I’d be a vegetable.

My mind had dissolved, but suddenly I jolted upright behind the wheel as though my guts had turned to ice. I nearly rammed into the car ahead of me; the line had stopped at the sign before the intersection. I slammed on the brakes, and the tires squealed. Through the rearview mirror of the car ahead, the driver frowned, studying my reflection.

I clutched the steering wheel like I wanted to rip it off in one yank. Three days until the weekend. Yesterday was Monday, not Tuesday.

I grabbed my phone and held it over the wheel while I waited for traffic to move. I followed the line of cars. When I spotted an opening, I sped into a tight turn, arms twisting on the wheel, crossing into the opposite lane. The front right tire mounted the curb. When the car crashed back onto the asphalt, the suspension squeaked, and I jolted in the seat. A delivery van approaching from that lane laid on its horn.

I kept glancing between the road and my phone’s contact list until I found the landlord’s number. I called. It rang once.

“Who’s this?”

The man sounded like he’d barely turned his head toward his phone’s mic.

“This is Alan Kivi. You were coming to check on my apartment this morning, 3F. But I’m working from home and need to focus.”

“You’re not here.”

It was hard to think while driving. The landlord must already be in my apartment, and he sounded irritated, though not in the way someone would if they’d found a dead child.

“I stepped out for an errand. I’m on my way back.”

“We agreed on this time, a general inspection every Tuesday at 7:45. I have limited time for each unit.”

While he spoke, I parked in the first open spot outside my apartment block, jumped out of the car, and sprinted upstairs. My nostrils flared so I wouldn’t pant into the phone.

“Sorry, but something came up and I have to juggle it from home. My hours are tight too.”

I slid the key in the lock and flung the door open. I stepped inside while pressing my lips together so I didn’t exhale too loudly. My eyes swept over the fridge and the closed freezer, the stack of plastic drawers on the counter, the dirty mug and spoon in the sink, and on the dining table, the cylinders of army uniforms, the socks, and a plastic bag of toiletries. Standing to the right of the doorway, the landlord was facing me. A gaunt man in his forties, crow-black hair streaked with gray, wearing frameless glasses and sharply creased pants.

It reassured me that my sudden entrance startled him, the same way you might surprise someone who’s cleaning a room only to look up and see a stranger standing under the door frame with a hollow grin. I had hoped that the day I rented this place would be the only time I ever saw him. Whenever I moved out, if I survived this apartment, I’d slip a note and the key through his mailbox and vanish.

He tucked his phone away. As if to avert his gaze, he turned to the entryway cabinet, ran a finger over the dulled varnish, and rubbed that fingertip against his thumb.

“You could wipe things down once in a while,” he said. He tapped the cabinet, near a pile of dusty coins and old keys. “To prevent damage, you should gather your coins and stuff in a tray, just like you’d use coasters under your bottles.”

I shut the door behind me while trying to breathe through my nose. Sweat clung to the hair on my forearms in thick drops, and a vibration pounded in my skull, making it hard to think. I stepped between him and the kitchen area like I was absentminded.

“Sorry I didn’t let you know.”

He ventured deeper inside.

“I can inspect while you work. I won’t make a sound.”

“No, I really need to wrap this up before I head to my main job, and I can’t concentrate with someone moving around in the corner of my eye.”

He gave me a once-over. Like dozens of other people, he peered at my sunglasses, maybe thinking I was joking by wearing them indoors, maybe debating whether to ask me to take them off.

“I can’t come back this week.”

“The apartment will survive.”

He craned his neck over my shoulder to look at the stack of drawers on the counter.

“All that food is going to spoil. Is something wrong with your freezer?”

I wanted to grab him by the shirt and toss him out. I’d told him to leave, and he was still getting on my nerves. I worked hour after hour to afford a one-bedroom with a kitchenette carved out of the living room, and I had to put up with someone who wouldn’t go when asked. No privacy, no peace, even in the space I paid for.

“The freezer works. I was just cleaning it out. Really, I need to finish up and get back to the workshop.”

He pulled out his key ring, twirling it around his finger, and then his features twisted as if a sudden jolt hit him. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and massaged his temple.

“If you wanted to postpone the inspection, why didn’t you let me know?”

“I forgot, that’s all. There’s no mystery. I’m just disorganized. If my head worked better, I doubt we’d have ever met.”

He rubbed that circle on his temple and stared right through me. Maybe he was thinking of fitting my inspection into the rest of his week, or maybe he was waiting for some kind of bribe.

I reached into my back pocket for my wallet. I counted fifty dollars in two twenties and a ten, and held them out. Already I pictured the meals I’d be missing for the next few days.

“For your trouble.”

He glanced at the bills, and through those frameless lenses I watched his pupils widen. He took a step back and raised one hand like I’d just offered him a line of coke.

“No, no. Let’s just forget it. Tuesday next week, can I come then?”

“Same as always.”

“At the same time?”

“If it changes, I’ll let you know.”

He let his gaze slide away. He opened the apartment door, nodded a goodbye, and slipped into the hallway. I rushed over and peered through the peephole just in time to see him heading for the stairwell.

I slumped back against the door. While my pulse calmed, I mustered enough saliva to wet my mouth. My face, my wrists, my back all itched like spiders were scuttling across my skin. If the landlord had suspected I was lying, would I have noticed?

I limped to the bathroom. I tossed the damp duffel bag onto the floor and filled the sink with cold water. I plunged my face in up to my ears. The bubbles from my nose rolled across my cheeks, and the freezing sting dulled.

I pulled off my shirt and used a towel to dry my neck and chest. I scrubbed my armpits. I wanted to sit under the warm shower again, but every passing minute came off my shift at the workshop.

I paced the apartment. What else had I forgotten, which tiny clue would betray me? Today I’d been certain—just as certain as I knew I’d woken up here, just as certain as I’d known where to find a clean shirt—that it was Wednesday. I would have shown up at the workshop like any other Wednesday, until a line of cop cars parked outside and the officers swarmed in to arrest me. While they handcuffed me and pushed my head down into the back seat, I’d wonder how they found out.

I needed to keep a shield even against my own mind, my own impressions. I had to double-check every fact in case this broken brain was trying to sabotage me.

I collapsed onto the moth-eaten wreck of a couch and propped my elbows on my thighs. I’d call work. I remembered the way my supervisor smiled, as if chasing off the darkness of the world, and I heard the echo of her tone with us, the same one she’d use with a baby or a drooling old man. I dialed her number. She picked up.

“I was surprised you weren’t here. Are you okay?”

Instead of faking coughs, degrading myself with that performance, I tried to keep my voice free of anxiety.

“I woke up nauseous, and threw up. I think it’s been coming on for a couple days.”

“That why you disappeared yesterday?”

“When?”

“We got together to celebrate your birthday. A surprise. But you vanished. I called your cell a few times in case you were still around.”

She’d pry some excuse out of me, like I’d asked for a party in my honor.

“I barely use my phone. Whenever I need it, the battery’s dead. Sorry.” I cut her off before she scolded me about my phone habits. “But yes, I’ve been feeling sick for days. I figured I’d rather throw up at home.”

“Too bad,” she said, half-playful, half-scolding. I pictured her pouting her lower lip. “I bought a chocolate-pecan cake. A shame you missed it. Your coworkers devoured it, but at least they’re grateful to you.”

She paused, waiting for me to thank her. Nobody had asked her to plan that ambush. What about me, or my behavior, made her think I wanted her to gather a bunch of people I barely tolerated so they could shine a spotlight on some personal milestone I hadn’t mentioned? In her world, as she looked over her minions from that big window in her office, maybe she saw us all as identical little cogs, each with a slightly different face.

She let ten seconds of silence pass.

“If you need to, stay home. If you feel better in the morning, come in. I’m sure your coworkers can manage one day without you.”

“No, I was calling to say that although I’m running late, I’ll be there soon. Throwing up cleared my head, and I took some medicine.”

“You’re sure?”

“You’ll see me at my station in a little while.”

We said our goodbyes. I hung up, removed my sunglasses, and buried my face in my hands. I stifled a groan. My animal self must have sensed a threat before my rational mind did, and as much as I wanted to shut down, I had to brace for an impending assault. My head was pounding. I stood up and looked at the closed freezer door. The landlord had said he’d be back next week, but could I risk believing him? Maybe I had annoyed him enough that he’d pop in unannounced another morning this week, claiming he had a gap in his schedule. Meanwhile I’d be on the line at the workshop, assembling one piece after another, and during each break I’d dread seeing flashing red-and-blue lights reflected in the windows.

I went to the bathroom and lifted the duffel bag. Water dripped into the puddle around my feet. I dried the bag off with a hair dryer and set it down, open, a few paces from the freezer. I waited, crouched in front of that closed door, as though some chemical shift in my brain might ready me for what lay inside. As much as I wanted to bury the boy in there and forget him, I had to keep him near, under lock and key, a key I carried in my pocket.

I opened the door and let the cold air wash over me. Part of me wanted to revel in the chill a moment, to clear my head, but inside, among the frosted walls, sat the plastic-wrapped package whitened by ice. Taut plastic forced the body into the shape of a Thanksgiving turkey, folded and compressed, the boy’s back and buttocks bruised purple. The soles of his feet. Around his torso, a band of skin as wide as a tire had turned black with necrosis, and on the back of his head, among thinning hair, a gash revealed a mass of blood and tissue—like an egg cracked open and left to rot.

-----

Author’s note: this novella was originally written by someone I have to assume was me, about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 1 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

Picture this: inside a meeting room in Irún’s main library, an assortment of office workers, students, and pensioners hunched over their notebooks around a large rectangular table. Coats and bags hung on the backs of their chairs, and at the center of the table lay a box of chocolates. While pens scratched against paper, the writing instructor hovered nearby, often pulling out her smartphone to shoot group photos for her Twitter feed, without consent I might add. Isabel Zubiri. A forty-year-old woman with warm olive skin, hair worn in a casual topknot, dangling earrings, a chainlike necklace, and cat-eye glasses with off-white frames. But nevermind those people. By then, I had deemed the course pointless, and I attended because among us sat an anomaly: Elena. Late twenties, last name unknown. You could feel her presence like a shadowy figure in the corner of your eye. Her almond-blonde hair fell limply around her pale face. Slavic features. A ghost’s beauty. Dare to look into those haunted blues framed by reddened skin, and you may have glimpsed echoes of commissars starving her ancestors’ village. Listen closely and you’d hear a distant wail, that of a newborn child abandoned by her mother. Elena was a quiet bird, born tired and with a heart full of holes. She usually wore a loose gray sweatshirt, likely the same one, in which you could barely make out her tits. I won’t get into how she behaved; that’s coming up. All in all, she was sexy as fuck. Her look and demeanor screamed “fix me.” She would ruin your life. But as the old song says: better to burn out, yeah, yeah, than to fade away.

Isabel, our teacher, her cheer a barricade against life’s harsh truths, adjusted her cat-eyed glasses and tapped her fingers lightly on the wooden table.

“Well then, let’s see what creative adventures you’ve cooked up for me in your time-travel stories! Who wants to be brave and go first? Remember, no wrong way to tell a tale… unless you’re not telling it at all.” She laughed. “And please don’t worry too much if you’ve sent me somewhere outlandish, okay? God knows I could use a vacation, even a fictional one!”

Elena eased the chair back, her slender, underfed figure rising. Her fingers held gently the edges of the printed paper while she focused on the words.

Isabel’s cheer faltered at the volunteer who had once stated that literature’s purpose was “to make the reader cry, scream, and bleed.” She quickly bolted on a professional smile.

“Ah, Elena, always the trailblazer. I must say, your commitment to sharing your work is inspiring. You’re one of the bravest souls in our little circle. Or should I say the boldest? Please, do regale us. Let’s hear where you’re whisking me off to.” Isabel’s gaze swept over the group. “And remember, everyone, we’re looking for those conflicts we’ve discussed: whether it’s a clash of personalities, a moral dilemma, or just the universe throwing some cosmic curveball. We’re all about the drama here.” She gestured at the silent ghost. “The floor is yours, Elena.”

Elena, her tired eyes fixed on the page with the intensity of a cryptologist, sighed, then began to weave her tale. I wish you could hear her voice: soft and creaky as if from disuse, and burdened with the weight of a thousand unsaid things.

“Isabel Zubiri, writer and teacher of writing, clutched the armrests of her time machine as the jostling journey shook the frame. An indicator glowed in the dim cockpit: July 1st, 1497. Florence, Italy. She would stroll through its streets, observe its people. Men in doublets and ruffs, women in gowns flaring out to their ankles like closed flowers. The air would smell of bread and dung and sweat, of herbs and spices from the markets. Amid the clucking of chickens and human chatter in that old Italian dialect, she would hear the bells of Santa Maria del Fiore. Secretly she would photograph the crowds, the palaces, and the churches. In the end, she would vanish without harming anyone nor pushing them off their paths, for fear of snapping the thread of history. The ultimate tourist in this land of the past, a voyeur to the lives of men and women long turned to dust.”

Isabel, seated, had leaned forward slightly, her fingers interlaced on the table as she listened. But she straightened up in relief.

“Well, Elena, that’s quite an evocative opening!” she encouraged. “I can already feel the weight of history in your choice of setting. Renaissance Florence, no less. The period clothing details were a lovely touch.” Some classmates nodded. “And I’m glad you’ve taken the ‘no harm to history’ rule to heart. That’s an interesting conflict right there, the struggle to remain unobtrusive and avoid altering events. It’s like the ultimate challenge for a writer, isn’t it?”

Elena’s eyebrows twitched. Somber and distant, she resumed her reading with the alienated air of the perpetually exhausted.

“Inside the time machine’s cramped cabin, a flash of light flickered. A jolt threw Isabel around, slamming her against the curved wall. She blinked to clear her vision. The indicator’s numbers blurred. While cursing, Isabel groped in the darkness for the control panel. She pressed buttons meant to reset the circuits, but the indicator’s digits kept spinning. The time machine crashed with a metallic crunch, squashing Isabel into the padded chair and rattling her teeth. Then the machine tumbled down, rolling over as Isabel, strapped in place, flipped and spun. The contents of her stomach rammed against her clenched throat in waves. Suddenly the time machine groaned to a halt, rocking Isabel against the seat, and its hatch door popped open, letting in a blast of heat. The indicator displayed dashes instead of numbers. She shuddered. Her head throbbed, her stomach churned. She tapped at the panel, but no sequence of buttons revived it. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Stay calm. The time machine came with a user manual for such emergencies. After unbuckling herself and crawling out of the hatch, she stepped onto cloggy ground. Hot, humid air filled Isabel’s lungs, heavy with the pungent stink of sulphur. Isabel, dizzy and nauseous, kept coughing. She stood wobbly in a vast swamp that stretched out into a brownish haze. On the horizon rose the dark bulk of a volcano, from whose peak climbed a column of ashy smoke lit by flickers of lightning. A ceiling of gray clouds hung heavy, casting the landscape of mud and reeds below into gloom.”

As Isabel listened, her smile had grown rigid, and she had shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Now her fingers drummed a nervous beat on the table.

“Oh dear. This is getting… rather intense, isn’t it?” she said, her voice carrying an edge of unease like a mother who has stumbled upon her teenager’s morbid drawings. “That’s our Elena, though, always taking the path that’s anything but well-traveled. Keeping us on our toes! A vivid departure from the serene Renaissance Florence, I must say. And those sensory details, they’re so… I can practically feel that sulphurous air choking my lungs.” Her eyes darted to her students. “And class, notice how Elena has woven multiple types of conflict into this scenario: person versus technology with the malfunctioning time machine, and person versus environment with that hostile landscape.” She adjusted her glasses and cleared her throat. “Would you like to continue, Elena? We’re all, uh, dying to know what happens next.”

Elena, while fidgeting with the sleeve of her gray sweatshirt, offered a thin smile. Then, gaze locked on the paper, she continued reading with the detached demeanor of a funeral director.

“The time machine, its hatch gaping like a wound, lay half-sunken in the muck. Isabel crouched beside it, coating her sneakers and ankles in mud, and inspected the metallic hull, which reflected the somber sky, for dents or cracks. A low moan rose from somewhere in the swamp, as if the earth itself suffered. Isabel wiped her forehead, her palm coming away slick with sweat. Her clothes clung to her body. The air burned her throat and lungs, forcing her to cough and spit. Isabel tugged her foot free from the clinging mud and nearly lost her sneaker. She trudged through the sludge, her feet sinking ankle-deep, to the time machine’s rear, and pried the storage compartment open. She pulled out the user’s manual, a thick binder of glossy pages, sealed in a waterproof bag. For a couple of hours, she followed the troubleshooting section’s steps. She tinkered with the innards of the contraption, wrestling with tangles of wires, flipping switches. Repeatedly she ducked inside the cockpit to check the control panel, then scrambled back out into the mud. The controls remained lifeless, and the indicator’s dashes glowed like the eyes of a corpse. In the gloom, Isabel, her eyes aching from strain, read the troubleshooting section to the end, and stared at the fine print: ‘In the event of a catastrophic failure, please contact your nearest time travel agent.'”

I chuckled, which earned me a swift glance from our instructor.

“Isabel hurled the binder into the distance.” Elena went on in her soft, creaky voice. “It sailed in an arc, its pages flapping, then landed with a wet plop. She slumped to the mud and wept, her chest heaving with sobs, the tears cutting grimy tracks down her cheeks. The time machine had become a useless sculpture in a world that never knew her name. Stranded. Abandoned. She would die here, her bones mingling with the mud.”

A few students exchanged uneasy looks. Isabel toyed with her necklace as a furrow deepened on her brow.

“Okay, Elena. You’re certainly throwing our intrepid writer-protagonist straight into the deep end. A classic case of Murphy’s Law, right? Anything that can go wrong, will. Just my luck! But hey… you’re not planning on stranding our poor heroine in this dreadful swamp forever, are you?”

Elena’s eyes lifted to meet Isabel’s, her gaze as blank and distant as the moon’s. She then resumed her reading.

“Isabel took deep breaths, inhaling the sour, sulphuric air, and her sobs subsided. I won’t die like this. I am a writer. My place is not among ghosts but among the living, men and women who have yet to read my works. She hauled herself upright, her legs trembling, her clothes heavy with mud. Calm down. Stay optimistic. Maybe I’ve landed in a bad spot, but the rest of this world can’t be so bleak. She pulled out her smartphone and turned on the camera to study her stained, wide-eyed face framed by dark, disheveled hair. Wisps of ash clung to her eyelashes; snowlike ash drifted gently in the half-light filtering through the ragged cloud cover. Isabel, her hands shaking, snapped a panoramic shot of the volcanic wasteland, the phone’s flash briefly illuminating the mud and reeds in stark white. Once she returned home, she would share the photo with the caption: ‘Guess who’s on vacation! #SwampLife. #TimelessTravels.'”

A faint smirk tugged at the corners of Elena’s mouth, and vanished as quickly. Isabel leaned forward, her fingers steepled. She opened her mouth to speak, but Elena, her gaze glued to the paper, soldiered on in a flat voice.

“Isabel set out across the swamp toward the volcano, its slopes a smear of black, its summit wreathed in smoke and lightning. The mud sucked at her sneakers with a rhythmic squelch, and the reeds brushed against her thighs. She would keep on trudging until her legs gave out. The swamp stretched out before her, a steaming expanse of mud, reeds, and fetid pools of bubbling water shimmering in the heat. The volcanic horizon flashed with lightning. Isabel walked for hours, treading when she could over narrow banks of earth that crisscrossed the marshes, where clusters of reeds rose with wide, yellowish leaves. Otherwise, her feet sank into the warm mire. The heat pressed down on her, thick and stifling. Her skin glistened with sweat, her hair was matted, her clothes reeked of sulphur, her trousers and sneakers were caked in thick mud. Isabel’s eyes watered and her nose burned from the acrid vapors. The muscles of her thighs and calves ached. Intermittent thunder silenced her labored breathing, the squelching of her steps, and the burps of the mud pools. A loud crack shook the ground, making Isabel lose her balance and fall forward, plunging face-first into sludge that swarmed with tiny, wriggling worms. She scrambled upright and clawed the sludge’s surface. While crawling onto solid ground, Isabel cried out. The echo mingled with the earth’s moans: a low, unsettling rumble. The reeds swayed and the water rippled. The volcano was hurling rocks and ash. Its peak, a jagged black crown against the leaden sky, spewed forth a towering column of smoke. Lightning danced in its depths. Down the sides of the mountain oozed a glowing orange trickle.” Elena, whose gaze was lost in the depths of the page, cleared her throat, then continued reading in a tense voice, as if the text was holding her at knifepoint. “Isabel had exhausted her emergency kit: the fresh water of her canteen, and the pack of vacuum-sealed astronaut meals. She yearned for a drink. Her face was a mask of dried mud, her hair hanged in muddy strands, and her clothes were caked in grime. Her heart pounded, her hands shook, her stomach growled, her tongue swelled from thirst. She found a pool of slightly less brackish water, where she washed her face and hair, her fingertips stopping at knots and tangles. Soon enough the landscape grew darker until the gloom forced Isabel to pull out her phone and switch on its flashlight. The pale light revealed a watery world of tall reeds and gnarled, barren trees rising from the mire. The volcano’s black slopes glowed in the darkness with streaks of red lava, and in the sky, the cloud ceiling swelled and churned like a living thing, flickers of lightning outlining its roiling contours. Isabel lay down on solid ground and slept as thunder rolled overhead and the earth trembled beneath her. She woke up ravenous. The sky had dawned with heavy cloud cover and a dusky glow. The volcano loomed like a titanic boil, and its slopes glistened with molten lava sliding down like charred cheese. Her throat burning, her eyes bloodshot from the volcanic ash and the acrid atmosphere, Isabel roamed for hours through the endless bog until she heard waves crashing. As she staggered toward the sound, the ground grew firmer, and the mud gave way to dry land. Out of the fog emerged a coastline where waves crashed against rocky outcroppings. Following the shore, Isabel came upon a beach. She crawled to the water’s edge, scooped up some in her palms, and drank. The aftertaste clung like rotten eggs. Isabel, spent, collapsed on the sand, and curled into a fetal position. The volcano loomed sideways, bleeding streams of lava. The rolling of the waves lulled Isabel to sleep.”

Isabel’s expression showed barely concealed horror. Her eyes darted around the room as if searching for a fire alarm to pull. When she spoke, she tried to inject a bit of sunshine into the oppressive atmosphere, but it came out strained.

“A frankly terrifying landscape… Endless marshes, being baked by a volcanic environment… I can practically feel the mud and the oppressive heat. Not the most pleasant sensation, of course. A bit too vivid for comfort. I must say, Elena, you have a knack for painting a bleak picture.” As her fingertips tapped on the table, she spoke like a negotiator trying to talk a person down from a ledge. “Do keep in mind that conflict can’t just be a relentless onslaught; it needs moments of reprieve, of hope, or even humor to balance the tension. Readers need a breather now and then, even if the character’s situation remains dire. Otherwise, it can feel a bit, well, hopeless, right? And hope is what keep us turning the page. You see, our craft is a careful balancing act. Too much tension can wear down the reader.” She turned to the rest of the students as if imploring them to save her. “Take note of the escalating stakes and the sense of isolation that Elena’s crafted here. They aren’t just setting elements; they’re creating psychological pressure on our protagonist. It’s not just about overcoming her immediate situation, but also about the emotional weight of being stranded in time and space. She needs to stay sane in the face of adversity. There’s a hint of existential crisis there, I think. Class, I’d love to hear from you. What conflicts do you recognize in Elena’s piece?”

A hamster-faced college student wearing a pink hoodie raised her hand, then spoke in a chipmunk voice.

“I liked that whole thing with the protagonist taking photos. It added humor in the midst of a very weird scene. Even in this strange, desolate world, she still thinks of posting it on Twitter or Instagram. I would do the same thing.”

“Right. A nice touch of absurdity. I appreciate that.”

Elena’s reddened eyes sought our instructor’s.

“I wish to continue,” she said in a hoarse murmur from a distant planet. “I’m almost done.”

Isabel straightened in her chair. She put on a porcelain doll’s smile.

“Of course, Elena. I think we’re in a good place to take a breather, do a little feedback round. Maybe give our other would-be authors a chance to test-drive their time machines.” She glanced at the clock on the wall. “But please continue. Let’s hear the conclusion.”

Elena sighed, then focused on the paper like a diver following a spotlight in the murky depths.

“Isabel dreamed of water. Clear, cold water dripping from a faucet, gushing from a tap. But she awoke to the roar of the sea, the sun a faint smudge behind the cloud cover. No sense of how much time had passed. A thin layer of ash had coated her, ash that drifted down onto the beach and the waves that rolled in from a dark, metallic sea. Isabel’s throat was parched, and hunger twisted her guts. The sand was black and coarse, mixed with fragments of pumice and obsidian. She stumbled along the shoreline, her bare feet leaving footprints that were soon washed away by the waves, their white foam hissing as they receded. At times Isabel dipped her arms into the cold current, searching for fish shapes. When she gave up, she lay exhausted and shivering on the sand and passed out.”

“Elena…”

“She opened her eyes to blackness save for the fiery veins of lava throbbing in the distance. Thunder rumbled in rolling peals. Her swollen tongue clung to her mouth. She felt dry as the dead leaves from last autumn, brittle and ready to crumble. She pulled out her phone, switched on the flashlight, and illuminated the damp, coarse sand. The bubble of light glinted off flakes of ash drifting in swirls. By the water’s edge, she spotted a foot-long silhouette. Isabel dragged herself forward. Her vision blurred and flickered with dark spots, but she distinguished a short-legged, flesh-colored salamander. Its gray eyes looked blind, its slimy skin shimmered sickly. A pang of hunger glazed Isabel’s eyes. She snatched the salamander, that wriggled weakly in her grasp. Her heart pounded. I’m sorry. She dropped the phone onto the sand, clasped the salamander’s head and snapped its neck with a crack. She chomped into its belly and tore out hot, pulsing chunks of viscera. Once the offal sat in her stomach, she picked up the phone and pushed herself upright. Activating the front-faced camera, she took stock of her ash-stained face, her mouth gleaming with blood. She forced a grin and lifted her index and middle fingers in a victory sign. When she snapped the photo, the flash blinded her. No matter; she already imagined the photo caption: ‘Conquering the elements. #KeepOnGoing.’ Isabel vanished. Before the phone plopped onto the the soaked sand, it blinked out of existence. A breaking wave lifted the salamander off the sand, and the undertow swallowed its carcass.”

Elena marked the end of her tale by sitting down, scooting closer to the edge of the table, and looking down at her paper with a blank face.

-----

Author’s note: today’s song is “I Was Born (A Unicorn)” by The Unicorns.

Hell yeah, new novel! I hadn’t been this antsy to return to my writing since I was immersed in a certain tale about a motocross rider. Could barely sit still at work while rearranging my notes. I hadn’t created anything totally new in months, and I’ve felt a bit rusty. Anyway, I thought this was quite the impactful introduction for our new protagonist, at least when it comes to the first outer layer of such a hopefully intriguing woman.

The next part should conclude this scene. I hope you folks stick around, because this one’s going to be lots of fun.

Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 2 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

I drove toward the outskirts as the sun hid itself, painting the sky bubblegum pink and the horizon raspberry red. I sank into the night the way a frog might slowly cook in a simmering pot. I switched on the headlights. The amber pulses of the roadside reflectors split the road into parallel lines, while in the dusk the rectangular white signs floated. In the next lane, glowing orbs of light would appear and swell until the cars passed me with a whispery rush.

My left arm rested on the rolled-down window frame as I smoked, dragging on the cigarette again and again, flicking ash into the cooling wind. The vibrant guitar riffs followed one after the other sounding weary, the way they might at the end of a tour.

I took a shortcut skirting an oil field and used the strip of plastic—like police tape cordoning off restricted land—to guide me. The car’s wheels rolled over barren dirt.

Hidden, nestled in the night, there was no one around to bother me. To keep me company, I would have only the coyotes prowling around and other creatures that had been raised in the desert.

I parked on the shoulder of the track. The headlights shone on an oval of cracked, mummified dirt. They bathed some shrubs with branches like insect legs, and the shadows they cast arched over the fissures in the brown earth like bridges.

I unhooked a Modest Mouse CD from its case and slipped it into the player. When the first track started, I leaned back in my seat. Still except for my arm and lips, which moved together so I could inhale each drag, I listened to the guitar, bass, and drums. The dashboard clock and other indicators floated in the car’s darkness like bioluminescent fungi in a cavern. Out in the headlights’ cones, insects—tiny black dots—fluttered silently. Isaac Brock lisped about endless parking lots.

My neck, which had been stiff as bone the rest of the day, relaxed as if a pillow cradled the base of my skull. My back slid down the seat inch by inch. I bobbed my head in time with the melody, while filling my lungs with smoke.

Those dark expanses of desert convinced me that there wasn’t another soul for dozens of miles around. I confused the background noise of far-off traffic with some gust from a distant storm. Any occasional honk was just part of the night’s wildlife—herds of prehistoric beasts that, upon seeing me, would ignore me the way I would ignore an ant colony.

Here, alone, nothing could hurt me. No one could force on me tasks and principles that revolted me. My mind ran free, unbothered by prying looks or those compulsive conversations people insist on just to fill the silence—those efforts they make so that their fellow humans will confirm they exist. The complications that choked the rest of my time distracted me from why I needed to come to the desert in the first place. I lived to water this inner core I understood and valued, at the risk that the world might tear it apart the way an invading army burns the fields. Whenever I drove to work or back, maybe some of the pedestrians framed by my car windows had been born with a core, too, but had let it die. They’d suffocated it to tend what they were taught mattered.

Even in my apartment, these moments of solitude slipped away—my upstairs neighbor’s footsteps drummed the ceiling in the small hours, and in the apartment next door, a family argued and yelled in Spanish. The night in the desert gifted a hush that the society I was supposed to belong to had forgotten. Time and the world pressed on these moments like tons of water against a submersible, but while the night lasted, I escaped the toll life demanded. I was saved from the people who insisted I cater to them and speak, who believed I should be grateful for it. I was saved from their forcing me to celebrate what I rejected, from making me wear a smile—just one of the many ways humanity demanded I betray myself.

I listened to three Modest Mouse albums and one by Radiohead. They turned the darkness into a canvas on which melodies and lyrics painted a living picture. Those musicians had saved their virtues from oblivion, while their everyday lives—the ones everyone else gets entangled in—would be lost like a millennia-old civilization beneath the sands. The music rose like a red clover sprouting through dry, stony soil. Even between miles and miles of wasteland where real people were missing, some persistent individual had managed to create life.

I headed back. The silvery oval of the headlights traced out the cracks in the earth, inking them black.

Memories crept in: the people at the workshop, the responsibilities they had pinned on me, the conspiracies they’d drag me into. My supervisor had glanced at my file. Why? And all day, my coworkers—the strangers in the team they’d stuck me with—knew she’d eventually haul me into her office for that idiotic ritual. They kept me in the dark. If they hid one thing from me, they could ambush me on a hundred pretexts. When I let my guard down, they’d corner me, their eyes gleaming with a shared intent. The mere thought that at some point in recent days the supervisor had been thinking of me, evaluating me, horrified me—like coming home to find the lights on and someone roaming around inside.

My headlights washed a figure in silver. It had stepped into the road, crossing perpendicularly. It stood on two legs, its head barely rising above the hood of the car. Glimpsed in my vision, like the afterimage of staring at the sun, was a face drained of color and two eyes gazing at me in surprise.

My muscles clenched. I slammed the brake pedal, but the figure vanished beneath the horizon of the hood. With a thud, the chassis jolted. The car lurched once, twice, as though the right tires had rolled over a rock.

My back slammed against the seat. My left hand jerked the wheel. The car skidded diagonally off the path, snapped through the plastic strip marking the off-limits zone, and plunged several yards into the oil field. I yanked the handbrake.

The headlights shone through a dust cloud swirling with insects, as though I had kicked over a hive. The engine rattled with clanking metal that sounded like a loose part.

My hands were locked, gripping the wheel and the handbrake, knuckles going white. I was panting. The impact’s echo reverberated in my skull like a tolling bell, and then it faded.

Heat radiated through my body. I pried my hands off the wheel and the brake.

Some bit of fabric was burning. Two inches from my knee, I felt a spot on my thigh heat up. I slapped my pants and sent the lit cigarette flying, a streak of smoke floating in the glow of the dashboard for a moment. A tremor inside my skull muddled my thoughts. I rubbed at the hole in the pants and the stinging skin beneath. I swept my foot around the mat under the pedals, just in case the cigarette was still lit and, in a few minutes, might force me to deal with a car engulfed in flames.

I shoved the door open and staggered out. It felt like escaping the wreckage of a Humvee in a blackness so absolute it suggested I’d gone blind. Keeping one hand on the hot hood, I circled toward the bumper while touching the right side of my face with my free hand—the ridges of the scars on that cheek and near the corner of my eye. A thin membrane of skin covered the bone and the knotted tissue. Nothing had exploded peppering the car with shrapnel, but the smell in my nose stung like melting metal or explosives.

I cut across the left headlight’s cone. I crouched near the bumper, but the glare hid the spot right in front of me, so I twisted around to fish my phone out of a pocket. It lit up with the manufacturer’s logo animation. Once the icons showed, I rummaged through the menu for the flashlight, but the phone vibrated and spat out a distorted chirp that grated on my nerves like a whistle shrieking inches from my ear. The screen alerted me to four missed calls.

I switched on the flashlight app. The now-bright screen took a slice out of the night. The center of the bumper was caved in with a head-sized dent, shiny with blood. Thick drops dangled there like strands of phlegm, tapering off toward the parched ground.

I straightened and felt dizzy. The phone’s white glare lit the windshield, revealing the seats as though I’d just peeked into a house window at night. I staggered backward while pressing one palm over my mouth.

When my head cleared, I searched the ground along the side of the car toward the trunk. I followed the skid marks in the dirt, tracing the tire tread pattern until I reached a place where the tracks on the right side were speckled with blood, like splatters on ceramic. I moved on until the light fell upon a body sprawled there, barely three and a half feet tall. Was I looking at a coyote’s back?

I approached the way I would enter a house I was breaking into. I made out the back of a shirt, filthy with stains and caked mud. A stench of urine and dried feces slapped me in the face, so I pressed the back of a finger beneath my nose. The legs were tangled, making it impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. He wore pajama pants. Fine, wispy hair—like a baby’s—covered his head, and a few inches above the nape, a gaping wound had opened, matting what hair he had. Beneath the head, a dark red pool of blood had spread. Floating in it, like bits of food in vomit, were gray, wrinkled matter and curved fragments of bone.

My arms went limp at my sides. In the phone’s shaky beam, I saw the trail in the dirt behind him, where the tire tracks vanished into darkness. I rubbed my eyelids. My legs barely held me. Surely I’d made some mistake, and if I stood still, holding my breath, I would open my eyes to find myself back in the car, still driving toward the main road.

The distant traffic noise could easily pass for a windstorm. Silence was broken now and then by snapping sounds, like the crack of a twig in the brush.

I shook my head. I stepped over the child in a single stride and crouched to shine the light on him. His arms—pinned under his torso or splayed across it—were twisted and bent as if they had no bones left. A tire had left its tread across his shirt, right over his heart.

When I finally dared shine the light on his face, for a moment I saw an animal in clothes. Then I blinked. An albino face. A cleft lip forced the nose upward, breaking one nostril and twisting the bridge, like someone had hacked it with an axe. From the reddened gums, teeth jutted in different directions like kernels of corn. The eyes, half-closed and slanted, hinted at some mental disability, and his ears—large and sticking out—spread like satellite dishes.

I moved backward until the gloom blurred his features. If I took three or four steps more, the night would swallow the corpse as if it had never existed.

My head spun, my whole body hit by a feverish chill. A child. I had run over someone’s child.

When I lowered my gaze and held my breath, the background noise swelled as if someone had turned up its volume. The traffic, hundreds of yards to my right. I braced for the sound of an adult running this way, calling a name over and over. Footsteps, then some figure bursting out of the dark to find me standing a few yards from their child’s body. No matter if the child had dashed in front of my car when he must have seen the headlights, this person would only understand that I had killed him. Around here, they’d probably be armed if they came out at night.

I aimed the phone downward and covered the light with my palm. A thread of white glow leaked between my fingers. I waited two or three minutes. When a distant horn blasted across the plain, I pictured a man perched on a tower blowing a horn.

I wandered around. The dried-out earth crumbled under my soles. To my right lay a wide desert cut by a highway. To my left, whose depths I couldn’t gauge, oil pumps dotted the landscape. They would be creaking in rhythm as they siphoned.

While pressing my temples, I shook my head. I glanced back at the blackness hiding the body, and felt like scolding the child for having run blindly into the road.

“Where were you going? Did you even know where you’d end up?”

Bent over with my hands on my thighs, I thought: What should I do?

Of course I’d call the police. With a trembling hand, I exited the flashlight app and punched in 911, but my thumb froze over the call button.

Besides wanting to keep silent, how could I explain myself to the cops? The dispatcher would pry out every detail. I’d wait for a patrol car that might get lost for a few minutes before it arrived, headlights picking out my silhouette maybe fifteen feet away. Two officers would step out, a hand resting on their holsters, ready for any excuse to shoot. They’d blind me with their flashlights and zero in on my scars, on my dead eye. They’d ask why I’d driven down this road in the middle of the night—what was I up to, dealing drugs? Hiring prostitutes? They wouldn’t buy that I only came out here for solitude; they’d call it suspicious. I’d end up in the back of the cruiser on the way to the station, passing through rows of desks under fluorescent lights. My mind would recede into static. I’d be put against the height chart, and the bored officer running the camera would tell me: Look forward. Flash. Look right. Flash. From then on, anyone who Googled my name—any prospective employer—would discover I’d killed a child. A disabled child. Even the workshops would refuse to hire me. The radio stations, the TV news, everyone would know. I’d live in a glass cell riddled with eyes. A disturbed veteran who’d failed to rejoin normal life, like some feral child found years later and unable to speak. Someone who would grunt, eat out of a bowl on the floor, run around naked.

I paced, rubbing my face, tugging on a beard that wasn’t there. About thirty feet away, the car’s silvery headlights formed an oasis in the dark, and as I walked in circles, the car’s body either concealed or revealed the beam.

How could I leave the child behind? Whoever found him would see he’d been struck. If I brushed dirt over the tire marks, that alone would look suspicious—someone obviously tried to erase something. I’d have to hide any sign that suggested I hit the child and then covered it up.

I turned the phone’s flashlight back on and rushed toward the car as though I was running out of time. I opened the driver’s door, knelt on the seat, and stretched my right arm into the passenger seat, where I’d left my Coke and the food wrappers. Gone. I groped the floor mat under the dash, among cigarette ash, butts, and old wrappers. The plastic cup had spilled, but the lid was still on. I picked it up. It felt like there was about a quarter left inside.

Contorting as I got out, I set the phone and the cup on the hood. I unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it off. Shirt in one hand, cup and phone in the other, I walked around to the front of the car and dropped to my knees at the dent in the bumper. I popped the plastic lid off with a snap, soaked the cuff of my shirt’s sleeve in the Coke, and under the phone’s beam, scrubbed the concave metal until every last crease shone spotless of blood.

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Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago, contained in a collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is Modest Mouse’s “Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset.”

I have zero memory of having written this scene. Zero. That disturbs me. I don’t know if to produce the details contained, plenty of which impressed me (I can say that because it feels like someone else wrote them), I just used my imagination or instead references. I’m not sure if these days I would be able to write similar details. Where did you go, me from ten years ago?

Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 1 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

The conveyor belt slid the next metal piece into the field of vision my tinted lenses cast in gray. My gloved hands hooked the cable pins into their holes and verified that no previous operator had ruined the work, while I measured my movements to prevent any later operator from blaming me for holding up the line. I pressed the button that ran the belt. The piece slid off to my right, lurching forward and stopping like a car stuck in traffic.

I rested my gloved fists on the edge of the table. The conveyor belt whirred, its segments blurring past. I already knew the shape of the piece that would stop at the center of my vision a few seconds later.

Seated across from me, Héctor yawned, warping that bray into an announcement that he needed to take a leak. Someone stopped the belt. A metal piece was left stranded halfway between Héctor and me.

The familiar sequence of motions for assembling each piece sedated my mind, dimming it to black, but now my thoughts were stirring awake. How long would Héctor take in the bathroom? Sweat had slimed my forehead and neck, and my underwear clung like a soaked pad, even though the air-conditioning units hanging from the workshop walls droned on tirelessly—our only defense against stewing inside this metal sarcophagus.

Christopher, seated ten feet to my right, stretched his neck to look around at the other crews. The jagged, arched scar on his scalp stood out pink against his brown skin. For the hundredth time, I pictured a surgeon pressing a stapler to Christopher’s skull until it clicked, branding both sides of the seam with jutting, pointed ridges—a zipper of scarred flesh.

“How strange that the coordinator’s absent,” the man said.

John, or Joseph—whatever his name was—ambled behind Christopher to stretch his legs. He rolled the sleeves of his coat up to his elbows, but the right sleeve got stuck on the gray, bulbous growths that deformed that arm. His genes had gotten mixed up, producing enough skin and flesh for three people.

“He quit a couple of months ago.”

Christopher hunched over, frowning as if thinking hurt. He toyed with the raised seam that cut across the side of his head.

“I knew that, right?”

“It’s no big deal.”

Three minutes later, heavy footsteps announced Héctor’s return from the bathroom. He circled the worktable, dropped onto his stool, and pressed the button that got the conveyor belt moving again.

A metal piece halted in front of me, its black cables overlapping and crisscrossing like arm hair. I checked every connection. I unhooked a couple of cables Héctor had misplaced, and fastened them into different slots. One day, they would invent robots to replace us.

Forty-three minutes before the shift ended, the conveyor belt stopped, jamming pieces at intervals between the operators. I waited, slouching, letting my gaze relax on the sections of belt in front of me. The next piece should have arrived by then.

To my right, Christopher glanced over at me, checking if I was the one holding things up, but across from me Héctor had slumped forward, resting his chin on his chest. The black-haired jowl bulged out. He had closed his eyes, opened his mouth, and tangled his gloved fingers in some cables on the piece he’d been working on. His black Queens of the Stone Age T-shirt, printed with a horned hand, had ridden up over his belly, and through the gap between shirt and pants peeked a swarthy fold of flab dotted with bristling hair.

When the horn signaling the end of the workday blared through the workshop, I sprang up and walked around Christopher toward the locker room, but he tapped me on the shoulder.

“See you later.”

I went on with my eyes locked on the locker-room door as workers filed in, opening and closing it behind them. The smell of hot rubber and metal stung my nostrils. What did he mean by “see you later”? Had he made up some plan for after work?

By the time I walked into the locker room, my pulse was shaky. After opening my locker, I took off my coat, folded it, and tossed it inside. I grabbed my pack of cigarettes, pulled one out, and slipped it into my shirt pocket. It was hard not to light up right there, but at least I’d finished another shift, scratched another mark on the wall, and I was about to claim the rest of the day for myself.

An electronic crackle buzzed. Everyone in the locker room turned toward the loudspeaker mounted in the corner.

“Alan Kivi, to the supervisor’s office, please,” a singsong female voice said.

I froze with one glove halfway off. What did she want? What had I done? I tossed the gloves on top of my coat and locked the locker. Coat and gloves put away, locker locked—my excuse to refuse overtime.

Shaking my head, I opened the door from the locker room to the workshop. In the supervisor’s office window, which rose above the shop floor like a second story, the glass blurred the figures of the four people gathered. Even though Christopher’s neck was hunched and his shoulders slumped, he still stood a head and a half taller than the others. The thick, barrel-shaped outline of Héctor fiddled with his phone. The supervisor, her hair down to her shoulders, leaned in close to each worker and touched them. She reached across the desk and lit the candles of a cake with a lighter.

I froze beneath the locker-room doorway. An operator from another team stopped in front of me and gave me a look, wanting to go inside, but before he could say anything, I stepped back. I paced in front of my locker. I fished around one pants pocket until I found my keys, and I fiddled with the cigarette filter in my shirt pocket as if I could sneak a drag.

How had the supervisor found out? If she noted my birth date when she hired me, she would have ambushed me last year to celebrate. In these past few days, she must have pulled my file, run her honey-coated fingers over it, and spotted the day I was born. I shuddered like someone who’s realized, while sitting on a public toilet, there’s a camera filming. Any private detail of my life worked like a tail sprouting from my coccyx for them to grab and hold me in place.

I hurried to the door leading out to the yard. I stepped into the dense, overheated air that smelled of scorched earth and traffic. I was heading for my car alongside the dispersing workers, but Caroline distracted me like a neon sign.

She was standing on tiptoe, bent over into a waste container. When she straightened, she was holding a plastic valve-shaped part with a cracked casing. She turned the piece over in her fingers, her lips moving as though greeting it. Her chestnut hair, tumbling halfway down her back, had frizzed the way it does on a day that threatens a storm. Beneath her bangs and between the strands framing her face, her skin was tanned like someone who labors under the sun. The floral pattern on her white dress had faded. It suggested that in the seventies it had belonged to some collection, only to be abandoned at a flea market. Her pockets bulged with broken machine parts, lost keys, odd stones she salvaged from dumpsters, ditches, landfills. Even from ten yards away, I noticed that horizontal tears had ripped open the dress’s sides and the flare of the skirt, as if Caroline had snagged them on bushes. Her cheeks were puffy and flushed. Her eyes, slanted and alien, glistened wet. Either allergies were hitting her, or she was stockpiling tears for the next time she burst into sobs.

While the sun pounded my forehead as though I’d pressed it against a light bulb, I slowed my pace to keep Caroline in sight through the stream of workers leaving the lot. She might have believed herself invisible, and the way everyone else ignored her only reinforced that notion. Caroline drifted around the waste container as if floating there—a specter that once lived in the house torn down to make room for the workshop. You’d expect a cold breeze to precede her, and I was surprised no one paid attention as they might if a dinosaur appeared out of a primeval jungle.

One of my coworkers—or the supervisor—might come looking for me. I reached my Chevrolet Lumina, but the moment I dropped into the driver’s seat and shut the door, I’d trapped myself in a sauna. A mistake I made every three or four days. I rolled down the window and stuck my head out to breathe while the seat roasted my backside through my pants and underwear. The air inflating my lungs coated their lining with the smell of overheated plastic.

I started the engine amid sputters and a gust of smoke. Once the dashboard lighter heated up, I lit a cigarette, drew on the filter, and blew the smoke out the window into the scorching air. The engine rattled phlegmatically as it accelerated toward the city center. Hanging from the rearview mirror, my vial filled with bits of shrapnel shivered while it spun.

On my left whizzed low-slung shops and single-story offices—white-painted corrugated metal walls that flashed under the sun, forcing me to squint behind my tinted lenses. On my right stretched the flat, orange-tinged desert, dotted with a few scraggly shrubs. Against a heat-warped horizon stood miniature telephone poles. Soon, the hunched silhouettes of oil pumps appeared, nodding like hammers in slow motion, their gears groaning and creaking—a herd of elephants drinking from the cracked earth. The desert’s immensity shrank the buildings, roads, and cars to dusty specks scorched by the sun.

Another year of this boiling air, of these people.

As I reached the city, I waited at a red light for ghosts to cross. A few yards ahead, a child crouched at the curb with a bored expression, pressing the tip of a metal rod against a flattened explosion of entrails and white-and-gray feathers smeared on the pavement.

Traffic thickened. Pedestrians roamed the sidewalks. I drove on to an In-N-Out Burger and joined the line of cars. Lounging against the seat, I smoked while the sunset sun beating through the windshield heated my face and hands.

A group of office workers in white shirts and dress pants walked by on the sidewalk. They followed one another like ducks. They had cloned each other’s hairstyles and that look of fatigue and resignation. A father carried his daughter on his shoulders, held his son’s hand, and used his other hand to grip a bulging bag. Next to him, a woman talked as she pointed to the end of the street. The man’s mouth hung half-open, and his features were weighed down by a week’s worth of exhaustion.

On the adjacent sidewalk, two groups of thirty-somethings ran into each other. Half the men wore Dallas Cowboys shirts or caps. I could have dubbed in real time exactly how they greeted each other and the small talk they exchanged. I could have predicted a split second early how their heads would nod, how wide their smiles would stretch. At some mention of where they were headed, someone in the other group laughed as if at a joke. There was only one group of thirty-somethings in hundreds, maybe thousands of miles around, even if they tried to fool me by changing outfits and bodies.

Did those people see their choices the way I recognized them? Their lives resembled museum galleries. They chose which corridor to walk down or linger in, while I wandered inside a cage. A prisoner locked up for decades in a six-by-eight cell, a person whose name got lost during a staff turnover—none of the new employees had bothered to learn his name or find out when to set him free.

Yet in the faces of those passersby—businessmen, office workers, families, couples—and in the faces reflected in the mirrors of the cars waiting in line for takeout, I recognized exhaustion. They had resigned themselves to the road they ended up on, knowing that if they dared veer onto a different path, they might land in a dead end. Other routines, other partners, other children.

What could anyone want of humanity and the systems that chained them? To deal with other people, to sacrifice their days working—just to start a family, spit out offspring, save for retirement? Those goals satisfied the ghosts around me. But if the emptiness, the desolation, and the lack of meaning in each maneuver to wade through these societies nagged daily like a dislocated joint, what was there left to do?

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Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish in a collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho, about ten years ago.

Today’s song is Modest Mouse’s “Custom Concern.”

I feel like I need to explain myself for this one. First of all, I had completely forgotten about every single detail of this story so far. It was like reading it for the first time. As I read some parts, I did get some faint recollection of having “seen” them before, but I don’t remember having come up with nor designed those characters. This story was very personal for me, and perhaps that’s why I haven’t revisited it even in my mind, as it closed a period of my life I’d rather forget.

You see, I was diagnosed as autistic when I was 26 years old or so. That came after a few failed jobs that proved I couldn’t work a regular job due to my autism-related peculiarities. So when I got diagnosed, I had hit rock bottom, and I didn’t see myself adjusting to society at all. I lived like a recluse, the pee-in-bottles kind, except for my therapy sessions and the group meetings with other adults on the spectrum (I ended up leaving those group meetings, ironically, because one of the psychs, a thirty-year-old woman, was overtly hitting on me). A local organization offered me to take part in a course to help disabled people rejoin society and get hired.

Because most social workers are apparently retarded themselves (I swear I’ve never met any of them I could respect) and into the whole “everyone is equal” shit, they lumped together people with intellectual, social, and physical disabilities. We had people whose limbs didn’t work right having to be told how to talk with an interviewer in a way that a Down Syndrome fella would comprehend. People with social disabilities such as mine weren’t particularly tolerated either; a few of the disabled there, one diagnosed with paranoia and persecution syndrome or some shit like that, and another with fetal alcohol syndrome due to what a bastard her mother was, kept railing about some autistic guy at their workshop, and how autistic people were this and that. I didn’t interact much with them, but at least I got some sense of satisfaction when we “had” to reveal our disabilities and they realized that the guy whose disability they have kept shitting on every day heard it all.

You see, one of the things that bother me the most about the imposed public perception of disabled people, and I mean from the moderately disabled (among which I include myself; I’m 52% disabled) to the hyper disabled that you only see in such centers, is that social workers and such pests have forced a vision onto society that disabled people are all so resilient and understanding and kind to others because they endure such trauma and discrimination. Well, plenty of the people I met there were fucking bastards. Some real nasty ones too. There are details that I decided not to include in this story because it would seem like I was insulting people with such disabilities, even though it actually happened; for example, a Down Syndrome guy routinely waltzed over to groups, ripped the loudest farts, and casually left. Another guy kept calling everyone a faggot. Someone else seemed to be converting to Islam, and regularly claimed that priests and such ought to be killed. It wasn’t particularly surprising that some of the particularly vulnerable disabled would convert, because the fucking moronic social workers put illegals with a jihadist mindset among genuinely disabled people, under the category of “risk of exclusion,” as if wanting to conquer this country for their religion was a disability. Is it really a wonder that I was regularly enraged?

Anyway, that organization showed me a workshop similar to the one featured in this story, an offered me to work there. But I couldn’t due to the extreme noise, my intestinal issues, and other stuff. I did learn plenty about how they experienced that life, though, and it resulted in this story. Whatever good it did.

Anyway, I dare you to enjoy it if you can.